


Eat, Pray, Sword Logic.

by illumynare



Category: Destiny (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Food Issues, Gen, just a lot of Eris feelings, my precious cinnamon roll
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-28
Updated: 2015-12-28
Packaged: 2018-05-09 21:49:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5556740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/illumynare/pseuds/illumynare
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nine times that Eris Morn was hungry (and some that she was satisfied).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Eat, Pray, Sword Logic.

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by a conversation on tumblr with nemonuus about [what Eris might have eaten in the Pit](http://nemonuus.tumblr.com/post/135077360604/illumynare-nemonuus-illumynare-nemonuus)

1.

Eris has been alive for six hours now. She's found a shotgun and a knife, she's killed two things that her Ghost calls "Fallen Vandals," and apparently there are hundreds more in the surrounding hills—because sometime during the endless dark she can't remember, Earth was invaded and humanity nearly destroyed.

She woke up surrounded by skeletons.

If she thinks about all that, it will be too much. So Eris thinks about the hot glare of the sunlight, the sweat trickling down her neck, and the hungry cramp in her stomach. She thinks about the apple tree in front of her.

"We should keep moving," her Ghost says nervously.

"Anything nearby?" she asks. She's still not sure if she should trust the strange little thing, but she doesn't have a choice.

"No, but—"

Eris holsters the shotgun and hauls herself up into the tree. She can't remember anything before she woke up this morning, but the motion is easy, natural, in a way that only long experience can explain.

The apples are golden, tinged with red. When Eris bites into one, she's sure that if she could remember every one of her days, she still would think she hasn't ever tasted anything so sweet.

 

2.

Omar twirls a chopstick between his fingers. "You, my friend, are going to regret that you ever blasphemed the sacred name of daikon radishes."

"Hm," says Sai, and scoops up another mouthful of noodles.

"I will find you in the Crucible. I will kill you fifteen times. I will—"

Sai slurps the last noodle, licks her lips, and says, "Still true. Daikons taste like Wizard shit."

Toland stares at his cup. "Every least aspect of a Wizard is the quiddity of death," he says, pronouncing each word with exaggerated precision. He's still under the impression that he isn't drunk.

"When we kill the Wizards in the Pit, dibs on saying, 'Quid this,'" says Vell, and punches Toland's shoulder. He rocks with the blow, spilling sake, and blinks owlishly at Vell.

Eris says nothing. She's been to this noodle shop a hundred times before, but never with a fireteam. For so long, all she had was Eriana and her own Ghost, but now—

Now Eriana is researching in the Tower, Eris's Ghost is perched on her collarbone (for once not worrying), and there are noodles in her bowl and friends all around her.

 

3.

Vell Tarlowe is dead.

Toland is whispering of Ir Yût, is longing for Ir Yût, and Eris knows that look in his eyes, knows—

None of them are coming out of here alive.

"Hey," says Omar, slapping her cheek. Except it's more of a pat, really. "Hey, Eris."

She blinks at him. Breathes. Her stomach doesn't turn anymore at the stench of Hive.

"What?" she asks.

"Got some ration bars," he says, pressing them into her hand, impossibly smiling. "We still need to eat, yeah?"

 

4.

Omar is the food of the Hive.

Eris thinks this, as she huddles in the cave. She can't bear to think of Eriana (now, yet, ever). She can't bear to think of how they have failed, of how Toland smiled as he turned to Ir Yût, of what fate waits for her own pathetic self.

So she thinks of Omar. Whom she could not save, and could not kill. She thinks of how he screamed, and how the Hive fed on his screaming. How every Thrall and every Acolyte she will ever face again has feasted on his pain.

Eris knows she is faint with hunger, knows that is why her hands shake. But there is only one food, here in the dark below: pain, and cruelty, and _forgive me, Eriana, but I cannot, I will not survive this—_

 

5.

There's a tangy sweetness to the blood of an Acolyte.

Eris crouches in the shadows, fingers clenched around her knife, and her mouth heats with saliva as she hears the Acolyte approach.

It's been so long, eating only Wormspore and the withered flesh of dead Thralls. She is desperate for something alive. Something that will make her feel alive.

Her Ghost is dead, and Eris has rolled each dead piece of its shell between her fingers. If it were alive, it would tell her to stop. If Eriana were alive, she would tell Eris to stop, _stop_ before she became no different from—

The Acolyte hisses, and Eris lunges, her knife slashing out. Blood splatters across her face and she licks her lips; then the creature collapses and she is already tearing at its limbs with her knife her nails her teeth, because she is _hungry, hungry, HUNGRY_ _—_

 

6.

When Eris finally finds her way out of the tunnels, it's in the Mare Ingenii. The "Sea of Cleverness," the antipodal point of the Mare Imbrium. She lives only because she finds the place opposite to where so many Guardians died.

Eris doesn't know that, when she crawls out of the Pit. But she knows that she is no longer a Guardian. She knows that she can see the sky, and the heartless glitter of the stars.

She can't see the Earth.

It's a second birth, this crawling out, and Eris remembers, she remembers how she woke up among skeletons and learned that all the world had died while she was dead. Now she's been dead again, reborn again, and she knows that she's on the far side of the Moon. She knows that the Earth may be green and glowing with reflected sunlight still.

But she fears.

Eris hunches in the ship she has stolen, gnawing at the shin-bone of a Wizard. There's no flesh left, but it's comforting between her teeth.

If all the Earth is like the moon. If the Tower is no longer different from the Pit. If.

The bone cracks between her jaws.

 

7.

Ikora wants her to eat.

Two weeks ago, when Eris came to stay at the Tower, Ikora said offhand—while paging through reports from the Hidden—"At least the food is better here."

Eris made the mistake of replying, "I have sufficient Wormspore for several years," and Ikora _looked_ at her.

Now there are food packages arriving at her ship every day. Hot dinners. Cold lunches. Packages of dry noodles, baskets of fruit. Ikora has decided that Eris Morn is to eat human food again, and she is attacking the problem with a Warlock reverence for methodical research.

The first day, Eris does try. She crams the bread and ham into her mouth. She chews. She's eaten worse things, far worse things, but when she swallows, the food sticks in her throat. A few minutes later she's vomiting it all out, Ikora's food and the Wormspore that she swallowed that morning.

She tries again the second day. And the third. It's just the same. Eris knows all about teaching her body to accept nourishment from unspeakable things, but she has no idea how to make herself accept something wholesome.

She tries not eating Wormspore. But all that happens is that she grows faint and nearly mad with hunger. She still has no appetite for human food.

So she stops. The things that will perish, she throws in a bin; she can make herself eat the mold off them, once they're rotten. The rest she piles in neat stacks; she counts them, again and again, glorying in the stockpiled riches, even though she can't eat any of them.

Until the day that Ikora sends her nothing but a package of raisins. They're small and shriveled and so very dead.

Eris looks at them. Then she puts them in her mouth, and imagines that she's eating dead larvae, plucked from the worm-pits of the Hive.

They're sweet upon her tongue. She swallows, and is satisfied.

 

8.

"I will kill Cayde."

Eris knows she is speaking, but her own voice feels wrong, deep and jagged and more furious than she's ever been at anyone but Crota.

Cayde-6 is not Crota. Eris knows this. But he stole her ship, _her ship,_ and now it's destroyed.

Ikora sighs. "I won't excuse what he did," she says. "But aren't you living in Tower quarters now?"

It's true. Eris has finally moved into actual rooms in the Tower. Sometimes, in the moments before she fully wakes, she smells the air and imagines that she's still a Guardian.

But her _food_ was in that ship. Jar after jar of Womrspore. Box after box of raisins. Packages of noodles, dried meat, smoked fish. More than she could have eaten in a month _._

She doesn't need it. She knows she doesn't need it. There are a hundred shops in the City that would happily sell her food. And she has a knife, and she hasn't forgotten how to hunt.

But that food was her safety. It was _hers._

Slowly, carefully, Ikora lays a hand on her shoulder. "Eris," she says, and _damn_ the way that Warlocks have always been able to read her. "You are safe here."

Eris hisses between her teeth. Her stomach cramps in hunger.

 

9.

Purple candles and many-colored lanterns glow in the twilight. Outside of Cayde, the Festival of the Lost is one of the most idiotic things ever to profane the Tower.

But as much as Eris still dislikes Cayde—after Ikora spoke to him, he did deliver 398 boxes of raisins to her door.

And he did help to kill Oryx.

There's no one left against whom Eris needs vengeance. It's a strange thought. She had been so sure that she would not survive the fight against Oryx. Or the fight against Crota.

She had been sure that she would not survive the Pit. Or the Mare Imbrium. Or the first day when her Ghost summoned her back to life, and there were Fallen Vandals in the hills.

Eris has learned how to force noodles down her throat. And she has learned how to remember the days when her fireteam smiled. It was harder than forcing herself to eat Acolyte flesh, but she learned it.

And now, as Guardians who have never faced Oryx or Crota laugh and wear masks of their dead enemies, she teaches herself how to give food away.


End file.
